Late Tuesday night, The Associated Press and multiple television networks called both states for Santorum. In Alabama, the former Pennsylvania senator had 35 percent of the vote to Newt Gingrich’s 30 percent and Romney’s 28 percent. With 85 percent of precincts reporting in Mississippi, Santorum was taking 33 percent of the vote to Gingrich’s 31 percent and Romney’s 30 percent.

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Santorum’s narrow wins — and Romney’s inability to draw a third of the vote in either state — add up to another vote of no confidence in Romney from the conservative, evangelical base of the Republican Party. Whether they might shake up the GOP primary fight enough to rattle Romney’s comfortable delegate advantage is unclear.

Speaking to supporters in Louisiana — another upcoming primary state — Santorum declared that yet another political comeback is under way, citing his victory in the Kansas caucuses last weekend as well as Tuesday night’s results.

“We did it again,” he told the crowd, thanking them for taking on “all the establishment” forces in Romney’s corner to back “the grandson of a coal miner who comes from a steel town in western Pennsylvania.”

The former senator pushed back against the growing consensus among political analysts that Romney’s rivals cannot overtake him in the delegate count but may be able to trigger a contested convention by blocking him from gathering the 1,144 delegates he’d need to clinch the nomination.

“We are going to win this nomination before that convention,” Santorum said.

Even before the results were all in, there were overt signs of pessimism from the Romney camp. The former Massachusetts governor did not have plans to speak on election night and senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom emphasized in a CNN interview that his candidate had faced long odds in the South’s core.

But only a day ago, Romney predicted he would do just that, telling a fired-up crowd in Alabama that he expected to take the state. The final polls before primary day — taken by Democratic firm Public Policy Polling — suggested that Romney was well within striking distance.

Romney enjoyed a heavy spending advantage in both states, as the super PAC Restore Our Future ran weeks worth of television ads and dumped no fewer than five mailers into the March 13 primary states defining Santorum in harshly negative terms.

Throughout the 2012 race, Romney has struggled to win evangelicals and the GOP’s most conservative voters and has been unable to win a Southern state so far — except for Virginia, where Santorum and Gingrich were not on the ballot.